Silicone Ethernet (SEth): a Nervous System for Robotic Touch

2026-03-09

AI Summary

This work addresses the high cost and complexity of wiring in conventional robotic tactile systems by introducing Silicone Ethernet (SEth)—a battery-free, miniature “neuron” unit that integrates sensing, communication, computation, and energy harvesting within a conductive silicone elastomer substrate. SEth enables scalable tactile coverage for either the entire body of soft robots or the skin of rigid robots. The system leverages the silicone matrix to form a wired-like network supporting priority-based arbitration, and provides capacitive touch and proximity sensing capabilities. It achieves a communication rate of 100 kbps, with sub-microwatt power consumption in receive mode and milliwatt-level consumption during transmission, supports communication distances up to 1 meter, and can transmit dozens of messages per second.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Multimodal Perception & Sensor Fusion
• Natural Language Processing: Ethics — Bias, Fairness, Transparency & Privacy
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness and ethical considerations in crowd work and in human-in-the-loop AI systems
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

Fine-grained robotic touch sensing is essential for tasks such as robot-human interaction and the handling of hazardous materials. Yet, the sense of touch of robots is limited by the cost and complexity of routing cables to embedded sensors. This paper tackles this problem by contributing Silicone Ethernet (SEth), a wireless solution for touch sensing, communication and power transfer within a conductive silicone substrate. SEth~\emph{neurons} require no battery and deliver computation, communication, sensing and energy harvesting within a compact package. These neurons are placed into an undifferentiated conductive silicone substrate which may form the entire body of a soft robot, or an outer `skin'for hard robots. Our evaluation shows that SEth achieves data rates of 100\,kbps with sub-$\mu$W receive and mW-scale transmit power. Exploiting the unique properties of the conductive silicone substrate, SEth provides prioritized traffic arbitration similar to that found in wired control networks such as CAN. The SEth network inherently supports capacitive touch and presence sensing and neurons can harvest sufficient energy to transmit 10s of messages per second at a range of 1\,m. Considered in sum, these features open new degrees of freedom in touch sensing for soft robots.

Problem

• robotic touch
• sensor wiring
• soft robotics
• tactile sensing
• embedded sensors

Innovation

• Silicone Ethernet
• wireless touch sensing
• energy harvesting
• conductive silicone substrate
• soft robotics